. Gravitas: The Underdog's Weapon:

Nigeria 2023: The Election Was Lost Before It Was Rigged 

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Why gravitas, not noise, decides elections in pre-industrial societies.

Lessons from Obama 2008, Britain, 

and Nigeria’s 2023 elections.

By Don Kenobi

#MolueMonologue | #OldManInTheMolue | #dk | #BigAgendaAfrica

 

Gravitas

In pre-industrial nations?

That is what wins elections.

Especially if one is the underdog.

Gravitas: dignity, seriousness, or solemnity of manner.

While unseriousness, and sometimes outright buffoonery (behaviour that is ridiculous but amusing), can win elections, as Trump has shown, it happens only in post-industrial societies.

I am just guessing.

I do not know how Trump won.
Perhaps it is the shift from proper, well-rounded education to a focus on marketable skills.
Or maybe it is simpler than that.

Perhaps gravitas no longer matters in post-industrial societies because they have untethered themselves from the traditional values that uphold dignity, seriousness, and solemnity of manner.

I really do not know.
I will need to study this in depth.

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Gravitas and Perception

Gravitas comes first. It deals with perception.
Substance follows. It builds on perception.

In politics, perception is more important than reality.
Elections are largely emotive matters.

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A Digression: Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer in the UK is about to lose his job.
Decent chap. Cerebral. Hard-working.

He has the right medicine for his country, but fails to realise one thing:
No one is listening to all that cerebral, noetic stuff.

He cut £200 to £300 per winter from ten million pensioners.
Knocked them off the Winter Fuel Payment benefit.

And he wants to raise taxes by mid-November 2025?

And I am thinking: Are you serious, Sir Keir?

Oh, you want to fix the economy?
Make Britain more competitive?

It is not your manifest destiny to do that, mate.
Play the game.

Listen to this.

An independent report for the Greater London Authority found that by the year 2023, the UK economy stood smaller, by one hundred and forty billion pounds, than it might have been had Britain chosen to stay in.

And by 2035, without correction or reform, it could shrink still further, by as much as three hundred billion more.

And yet?

And yet Nigel Farage tops the polls. Monday, 3 November 2025.

So tell me:
What is the point of fixing the economy, only to have a lying scofflaw replace you, one who will unravel not just the economy, but the very pillars of society and democracy itself?

What is the f*ing point?

End of digression.

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Obama and Gravitas (Lessons from 2008)

When Barack Obama visited Berlin in July 2008 as a presidential candidate, a massive crowd, more than 200,000 people, gathered near the Brandenburg Gate to hear him speak.

As a candidate for American president?
Four months to the November 2008 election?
In a foreign country?
Two hundred thousand people came to listen?

Unprecedented.

Yet when he got back home, though clearly ahead of John McCain, he continued his run for the White House like he was several points behind.

It was an epic last stretch.

Almost like a Kenyan runner far ahead, yet manic about losing, sprinting the final stretch as though catching up.

Now imagine that runner somehow being beaten to the finish line.
Graciously, he would accept it, saying to himself, I gave it my all, and saying so with great pride, even to his grandkids decades later.

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And Now: Nigeria 2023

I wrote the bulk of this essay in November 2022. A call to gravitas.

At that time, I was critical of what I considered the lassitude of the popular candidate.

By most accounts, and I tend to believe them, he might have actually won those elections, by a wide margin too.

But?
He still ended up second runner-up.

I was also worried that his supporters were basking in unseemly pre-election euphoria many months before the elections.

He gave off the vibes of a man sitting on a hammock somewhere on a beach in the Bight of Benin, sipping orange juice, waiting for a grateful nation to send a chopper to whisk him to Eagle Square, Abuja, to be sworn in as President.

A remarkable lack of seriousness.

Five months before the elections?
Five months is a lifetime in politics.

I was livid.

In politics, perception is more important than reality, especially the perception of your opponents. That candidate was perceived to lack gravitas.

His most important talking points were being mocked, as politics always does, but he had no credible organisation to push back.

He was the underdog, yet a remarkable lack of self-awareness kept him lying on that hammock, smiling beatifically, waiting with a confidence not given to mortals for the helicopter ride to Eagle Square.

The ruling party cannot be the underdog.
Not in a pre-industrial society with large power distance.
Not in African politics with zero accountability.

The ruling party has the full force of the State, as the recent elections in Tanzania have shown in the most brutal fashion, where hundreds are feared dead.

Therefore, they should have done what Obama did when he returned from Germany.
Four months to the November election.
Run like the wind.

The times were dire, I warned.
If the corrupt status quo prevailed, we would be in great trouble.

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On Structure and Leadership

Post-mortems in Nigeria do not find lessons. They find blame.

If there is nothing specific to blame, we blame everything:
Religion.
The oligarchy.
The cabal.
Tribalism.
INEC.
Everything.

Forget that though the wind was behind you, you never trimmed your sails to take full advantage.

You had Obama 2008 to learn from, but you did not.

No one man can solve problems caused by tens of thousands of corrupt citizens over six decades. Do not kid yourself. You are no Hercules. No messiah.

Thinking that you have superior knowledge to all who came before you actually disqualifies you from the job.

Think about it.

Would you hire a conductor who believed his own mastery of every instrument would make the orchestra produce more brilliant music?

Clearly not.

He does not understand the job.

An orchestra works precisely because many skilled musicians perform in synchronisation. His own skill means nothing if he cannot make the group perform in sync.

The structure of an orchestra is vital to its performance.
Structure comes before skill.

In politics too, you need structure.
You do not build a plane in flight.

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Gravitas and Circumspection

In my early safety-training days, we were shown a clip of a plane being built mid-flight.
As a training aid, it was hilarious.
In real life, it would be tragic.

Circumspection is often embedded in gravitas.

Do not take unnecessary risks.
Play by the rules, and play harder.
Do not assume people are so desperate for change that they will spare you scrutiny.

At some point, people will grow tired of the minimisation of their daily, generational poverty.

They will think to themselves:
“If it were so easy to get out of this mess, it would not be this chronic.”

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The Final Word

Nigeria is falling apart.

Our success as a nation cannot be a gift from any politician.
It is an enterprise for us all to achieve.

Though much has been lost, much stolen, much remains.

These lines from Ulysses by Tennyson say it best:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides;
And though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven;
That which we are, we are.

Once again: gravitas is what will win, if you are the underdog.

Sadly, the person who needs to learn this is still on that hammock, sipping orange juice, convinced of only one thing: that he was sent by God to save Nigeria.

He wasted the hopes of Nigerians who dared dream in 2023. We watch in trepidation

I rest.

Don Kenobi
Updated 3 November 2025
Originally written 3 November 2022